Sport fishing is the most popular of all recreational activities in first world nations and represents a multibillion dollar annual investment in equipment baits and tackle and other expenses of getting to and from the water. From time immemorial, tremendous creative human ingenuity has been applied to the creation of baits and lures. This quest for the "ultimate bait" has recently been elevated from a cottage industry to a true scientific discipline as man's understanding of game fish behavior has become more refined.
Until recently, synthetic baits were designed primarily to attract fish through an appeal to a fish's visual system. Primitive synthetic baits were merely visual analogues of live bait, giving only the visual appearance of the "real thing" that free living fish normally fed upon. From these observations, newer more modern baits were designed to optimize visual attraction and baits were designed which began to look very unlike the "real thing" viz. rubber worms and related baits. For instance, it was discovered that fish would respond more strongly to unnatural colors, shapes and motions than they would to their natural food source. The discovery that the lateral line nervous receptor system detects vibrations in water that indicate an injured potential food source causing a fish to orientate in the direction of the source of vibration has resulted in wriggle and rattle lures. Also, it has been shown that fish are strongly attracted to flashes of light, luminescence, flourescent true colors, transparent colors, spectral gratings and highly reflective colored surfaces, hereinafter sometimes referred to collectively as opticals or optical attractants. The highly successful Norman lures are designed to maximize all of the above mentioned features.
With the development of modern soft plastics and silicone rubbers, textural cues have been added to the list of sensemodality attraction. The logic, here, is that if it looks good and moves properly through the water, and the bait has the proper textural feel to it when the fish tests it, the fish strikes. The so called "rubber" baits, however, are hydrophobic and do not get slippery in water, which is thought to limit the efficacy of their textural context.
The most modern developments in fish bait and lure design deals with the sense modalities of olfaction and taste. It is now known that fish have exquisite olfactory and gustatory systems. Even sight based predator fish such as walleye are thought to have olfactory systems more sensitive than a blood hound while scent feeding fish such as catfish, carp and suckers are thought to have olfactory systems thousands of times more acute than the most discerning mammal. Attraction vs. avoidance behaviors in fish is strongly influenced by olfactory cues, and as evidenced in both salt and fresh water systems, may be the primary dominant cue in the initiation and sustenance of the so called "feeding frenzy". At the present time the olfactory attractant industry is quite young, but is rapidly growing because sports fisherman observe empirical proof of the power of scent attractants to catch fish. Unfortunately, no effective controlled time release and dose controlled system for olfactory attractants has been developed. Thus, the effectiveness of a scented bait in the water is extremely short lived. Oftentimes, by the time the fish have arived in the vicinity of the bait, the bait itself is exhausted. Thus, the fisherman is relegated to the annoying task of removing the bait from the water every few minutes and freshening it with another dollop of scent.
Efforts to alleviate this problem have thus far been embarrasingly primitive. The use of fibrous plastic networks and sponge-like devices not only fail to extend to effective functional life of scent attractant lures, but they also fail to attract fish on the basis of their other sense modalities.